Fur­man has his eye on two ti­tles

DEAN FUR­MAN con­ceded that at the Moses Mab­hida Sta­dium tonight when his club Su­perS­port United take on Kaizer Chiefs in the quar­ter­fi­nals of the MTN8, they will be out­num­bered in the stands – Amakhosi’s le­gion of fans out­do­ing Mat­sat­santsa’s small loyal group.

But the Su­perS­port skip­per main­tained the mar­gins for am­bi­tion be­tween the two clubs over the years were now al­most non-ex­is­tent.

In the Premier Soc­cer League era, Chiefs have won the cham­pi­onship four times – that’s one more ti­tle than Su­perS­port. And in the past two years, Amakhosi have failed to win any sil­ver­ware, while Fur­man and his team­mates have won back-to-back Ned­bank Cup tro­phies.

“We are look­ing to com­pete at the high­est level in this coun­try,” said Fur­man this week. “Chiefs are a top side and we faced them three times last sea­son and were sim­i­larly matched be­cause we drew and beat them on penal­ties in a cup match. On the day it will de­pend on the tac­tics.”

To sup­port his ar­gu­ment that Su­perS­port con­tinue to look to im­prove, Fur­man con­firmed he was close to sign­ing a new con­tract with the club.

“I am very happy here,” he ex­plained. “And I am in­cred­i­bly hon­oured to be the cap­tain. I don’t want to go any­where at the mo­ment, so hope­fully I can sign the con­tract in the next few days. There’s am­bi­tion here. Yes, it is hard to com­pete with the tra­di­tion­ally big teams, but I think we are do­ing well.”

Fur­man has also backed new coach Eric Tin­kler to help them be con­sis­tent enough to avoid fall­ing off the ti­tle chase as early as they did last sea­son un­der Stu­art Bax­ter. Su­perS­port fin­ished fifth, one spot be­hind Chiefs, but saved their sea­son with the Ned­bank Cup triumph over Or­lando Pi­rates in June.

“They are two dif­fer­ent coaches, which means there will be slightly dif­fer­ent ap­proaches,” said Fur­man in dis­cussing Tin­kler and Bax­ter.

“Eric cer­tainly wants the more ex­pan­sive type of play like we saw last sea­son when he was with Cape Town City. He has laid down the gaunt­let for us and re­minded us that in five games we can be in two cup fi­nals be­cause we are still play­ing in the quar­ters of the CAF Con­fed­er­a­tion Cup.

“What bet­ter per­son to guide us than Eric? He has told us we can do it and we don’t want to be as­so­ci­ated with the word fa­tigue when we look at our sched­ule. Our early tar­gets wouldn’t be a bad way to start a sea­son.”